


her right to a second chance

by angelicpdf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Jessica Moore Lives, POV Alternating, POV Outsider, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:53:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28928343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelicpdf/pseuds/angelicpdf
Summary: Six perspectives surrounding an alternate season one of Supernatural.
Relationships: Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Comments: 15
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

At the south end of Stanford’s English department there’s a window with a ledge, and it's home to a young woman with cheeks dusted with a little too much blush and blonde curls that someone in philosophy 102 will claim are faker than her smile. They would be wrong, but only just. Her boyfriend sometimes sits with her, his back straight and his chin up, confident when they laugh together. Sometimes, most times actually, they’re both silent with their noses stuck in books. 

It's the week before Halloween when the boyfriend stops showing up. It's unusual to see her without him so often and her face seems hollowed out now, like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Someone sees her throw up in the bathroom across from her window, someone offers her a mint only for her to start crying. But no one really thinks that bit is important. She definitely didn’t seem to. She keeps showing up and it almost seems like a game of catch up. Someone in her Catholicism class asks after her when her seat ends up empty three classes in a row. No one has an answer. 

The last time anyone sees her is when she gets all dolled up for a Halloween party, her costume matches her lipstick and someone sees her knock back shots with her boyfriend. They look happy enough, hands touching hands as they leaned on each other all the way home. 

It's November when she stops showing up at all. Rumor has it her apartment burnt down, rumor has it her boyfriend killed her, rumor has it? That maybe she was never there at all. But people still whisper and it wasn’t like she was any special. Just a blonde girl with rosy cheeks, just a girl with a boyfriend, just a girl who may or may not be dead. She isn’t dead, no one seems to get that. 

The apartment, burned all the way through no matter how many claim that that bit was the real rumor, doesn’t hold the answers. But a guy in a brown leather jacket and a vintage car pulls into the parking lot by the school bookstore. He returns a pile of textbooks with the name “Jessica Moore” written on the rental label. Someone stops him, asks if he’s family. He smiles with all his teeth and says he’s a friend. No one sees him again and somehow, that's when people stop talking about Jessica Moore. 

Quickly, all the rumors die and the whispers sputter off into oblivion. No one takes her spot at the window, not yet, but every once in a while the hallway leading to it will get cold enough for puffs of air to mingle with the April light shining through. It’s probably the cooling system gone haywire, but no one seems to be able to fix it. 

There’s a reported grave desecration in town some months after Jessica Moore disappears. The cold spots in the hallway fade and soon enough, someone takes a seat on her window ledge and no one bats an eye.


	2. Chapter 2

In a motel somewhere between Norfolk and Atlanta, a housekeeper finds a ring of red in the bathtub of room eleven. The towels are in the trash, all soaked and dark with blood and when the police empty the bag, there’s a pile of blonde hair at the bottom, stained blotchy red. 

Three weeks later and the DNA tests bring up no results, but a month after that they get a hit on the description of a young blonde woman who went missing in California. A 22 year old Stanford student, Jessica Moore. The station sends the hit across state lines, they provide the description of the man, caucasian and a little over 6 foot, wearing a brown leather jacket. No one caught the car they came in and the lead dies in the throats of her parents. 

Somehow, only one month passes before the description of the man Jessica was with makes another hit. This time in St. Louis and yet again, it goes cold, this time with the dead body of Dean Winchester. The Moore family is hounded by a reporter, a sturdy man with a truck who seems more interested in Jessica’s boyfriend than in Jessica herself. He doesn’t ask after Dean, doesn’t even mention St. Louis and maybe that’s what keeps the Moores from talking. 

Mr. Moore tells the man nothing, keeps the truth, that Jessica went missing after her and her boyfriend, Sam Winchester’s apartment burnt and burnt until there was nothing left. He refuses to mention the fact that Jessica had called once and only once to tell him that she was fine, that she was safe. And maybe insignificantly, he keeps the fact that he believed her until they found the scene at the motel to himself. No one needs to know how he failed his daughter, no one but him. 

The man with the truck leaves after three days and the Moores keep quiet, they keep still and keep waiting for Jessica to come home. Mrs. Moore passes a prayer request to her book club, asks them quietly if they’d do her a favor and pray for Sam too, for him to come home with Jessica, for the both of them to be safe. She doesn’t mention it, but she silently hopes that Dean Winchester was keeping them safe too, but she doesn’t think too much about what everything else means, the blood in the motel room and the deaths in St. Louis. Afterall, there is only so much a mother can handle.

She doesn’t say this out loud either, but she has an aching, hollow feeling that if Jessica was still alive, Sam might not be.


	3. Chapter 3

His watch stops at 9:37 pm on November 2nd. The radio cuts out right after and by the time he puts two and two together and turns around, the fire has blown out the windows of his brother’s second floor apartment. At 9:47 pm Jessica, frantic and already in tears, runs up towards the firemen, the police, the ambulance and screams for answers. They don’t have any, nothing that would appease her. He knows how this story goes, from across the street with the rest of the building residents, those that made it out alive. Dean steps forward again and again, making his feet move even though he knows how this story goes, that he wouldn’t see Sam again, and Jessica wouldn’t care for what he had to say. 

Seeing the loved ones that survived the cases he worked on was sometimes worse. Seeing the woman that Sam loved beg the response teams for answers isn’t worse, but god, it's pretty damn close. 

He reaches her and when she turns to face him, she stands still, nearly eye level with him. Her grief and his stand stoic beside them. Jessica lets out a sigh, her entire body shaking. Instinctively, Dean reaches out to her, his hand on her shoulder as she meets his eyes again. She nods, as if she understands, beyond all reason what Dean wasn’t asking. He guides her towards the impala and gets ready to tell her the truth. He gets ready for a screaming match of grief competing with grief. Somehow he doesn’t get one, and instead gets Jessica curled up in his passenger seat, as they head towards the cheapest motel on the edge of town. 

Three days later though, Dean notices that Jessica won’t talk much. In fact, after they receive the report that the body in the apartment was in fact, Sam’s body, Jessica stops talking altogether. But he knows this story, so when she asks after days of not speaking, if she can go with him and if she can help him find John and kill whatever killed Sam, he can’t bring himself to say no. No matter who she is, he won’t (can’t) do this alone. 

They don’t leave just yet though and Jessica pointedly doesn’t tell anyone where she is. He sees her break her phone to pieces, sees her come back after a few hours away with a bag from GoodWill. Her face is set in blankness and he knows he isn’t doing much better, thinks maybe Jessica is the only one that gets it. Sam was theirs, their family and their loved one. 

She tells him as they pack the car that she got a call from a guy named Brady that night, she tells him, simply, that she knows he was responsible, that Sam’s blood is on his hands. He doesn’t ask her how she knows, but for once, not knowing makes him feel better. She asks Dean what can kill a demon, her eyes filled with something angry, something that he knows well, that he sees in the mirror everyday. Even though he wants to, Dean doesn’t lie when he turns to her, 

“When I find out, you’ll be the first to know.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please heed the new warnings and tags for this chapter.

The Santa Clara County police don't reveal the identity of the body from the apartment fire to the Moore family for months, not until after the St. Louis incident revealed Dean Winchester to be a person of interest. Even then, the Moores had already been harassed by reporters like the man in the truck, private investigators, and even a young woman who called herself Meg, with a pixie cut who claimed to be a friend from Stanford. She’d been there, half begging for answers, just like the man in the truck and everyone else. 

But what they didn’t know was that Meg had been tailing John Winchester for months now, and before that she’d been practically breathing down Jessica and Dean’s necks. It didn’t hurt though, that now she knows how the Moores reacted to the news or that she knows what their living room looks like, how it felt heavy and weak with their grief, or even that she knows exactly how Mrs. Moore sobbed when confronted with the truth. Meg moves on soon after, she has work to do. 

The information about the body in the apartment becomes public knowledge soon after the Moores get the news, and it seems to be another nail in the coffin for the Jessica Moore case. With both Winchesters confirmed dead, all leads to Jessica seemed to have burnt up and faded. If Sam was dead, who was Jessica still with? Hell, was she alive? Meg knows better though, she knows enough to get herself to Chicago and into the same bar as Dean and Jessica the same night the two of them arrive to investigate the monster she had gotten just for them, a present if you will. 

Meg and Jess make small talk over a half spilled drink, because friends are friends, right? Even when you plan to rip them apart. But regardless, Jessica looks nice under the low light of the bar, her low rise jeans and battered converse matched up with a blue baby doll tee, many would call her provocative, slutty even, but Meg isn’t a prude. She notices when Dean stares too hard at her and sometimes Jess too and it becomes clear enough to her that they aren't tied up like that. Meg gives Dean some credit for not banging his dead brother’s girl, but not too much. It seems like just an awful waste of fresh meat. 

Either way, despite Dean’s apparent moral code and Jessica’s outfit, Meg thinks they would both look better dead. So she lets Dean follow her home, lets them later follow her to her building of choice. But what she doesn’t expect is Jessica to hold her own against her, for Jessica to fight with every ounce of herself to make Meg pay. The blood on Jessica’s blonde hair painted a pretty picture, but the kick to the chest, the glass in her back, and the feeling of her back shattering on cement, that was way less pretty. 

Dean and Jessica seemed to make a hell of a team, they seemed to understand what they needed to do to survive in this game. Meg couldn’t win just yet, she wasn’t allowed, but making sure the Winchesters were split up, making John Winchester turn tail and run? It was just about worth the feeling of her ribs puncturing her lungs, but maybe only just.


	5. Chapter 5

The flames, the burning, the smell of his skin charring, it all blends together and becomes an almost meaningless blur. Except that now there is nothing anyone could say to get him near a fire, near a lighter or a match. But it doesn’t seem to matter to him much, almost nothing does. Even when Brady introduces him to Meg, the daughter of the thing that had taken and had continued to take everything from him, Sam throws a punch. She doesn’t step back, she lets his fist collide, but when she smiles at him and throws one back, he doesn’t expect to feel only the small stirrings of a rage larger than himself. 

But besides that, besides the flames on his skin, the burns on his arms and legs and the demons he’s now riding with, nearly living with, he feels very little if anything most days. Except for the need to survive. Staying away from the flames, from danger, just until he can see them again. But he hears too much from Meg as she scatters herself all over the country, tracking John, keeping tabs on the Moores, and tracking Dean and Jessica. Sam aches for the Stanford English hall with Jessica, aches for his apartment, aches for his family and for home. And so, instead of the nothingness and the fear, he lets himself feel that simmering of anger under the surface. He keeps it there, waiting. 

Meg mentions Dean and Jessica offhandedly whenever they see each other, comments like “Jessica was wearing this lovely baby doll shirt, Sam, you should have seen it.” or “Dean was staring at my cleavage, didn’t know you had a perv for a brother, Sam.” are common, but Sam knows she gets off on the fact that his jaw clenches and clicks every time he hears their names. He keeps that feeling, keeps it close and lets her talk. 

So Sam watches from the outskirts, passes through the towns he’s allowed in. Sometimes he let’s Meg ride shotgun in whatever car he’s stolen that week, sometimes he wants to ask if she’s seen Jess, if Dean and her are alright. But he knows he isn’t allowed to know more than she lets on. He keeps quiet and lets her fiddle with the radio. Her taste in music is like Jessica’s, heavy and rough around the edges, it grates on his ears in a way it never did before. Sam turns off the radio and lets Meg bitch at him about that and also nothing at all. 

He spends months like that, waiting, biding time as close as he can get. Eventually, after what feels like decades, it pays off. It’s in a cabin in the middle of nowhere where Meg lets Sam see Dean and Jess. She’s bleeding from her mouth, her leg shifted at an odd angle, she says she's tired of making everyone play hard to get. He wonders why she hadn’t felt the same way after Chicago, but he knows Meg too well now, knows she’s almost as stubborn as he is, but she’s weak when it comes to her father’s orders. She hates the “good soldier” act just as much as he does. He doesn’t think too much about it though, he has work to do. 

Sam pulls up to the cabin in a shitty pickup, Meg riding shotgun yet again, about to walk into whatever war zone his family has gotten themselves into. But none of that is really on his mind, all he knows is that it's been over a year, he knows they think he’s dead and nothing more than bones and ash left back in Palo Alto. So he isn’t surprised when Jess points the Colt at his temple the moment he walks in the door. But he’s pretty damn relieved when she takes in his face and asks, 

“Sam?”


	6. Chapter 6

It’s a year before she sees Sam again. A year of endless road and a year with blood and gunpowder under her nails. A year of feeling like everything weighing her down before Sam died was pathetic compared to this, the hunting life. The chasing after a ghost of a father while killing what she used to think was just the wind in the night, it got to her. Dean noticed and let them stop when it got to be too much, they’d hole up in another motel, drink cheap beer, play cards, and talk about Sam. They talk a lot about Sam in between everything else, all the gore of her new life.

There’s Meg, with her body shattered on the cement after Jess shoved her out of that window. There’s the nightmares of fire, demons, and all the news momsters she knows how to fend off with iron, silver, and rocksalt. There’s the anger that’s new to her, that she doesn’t know how to deal with. And, maybe worst of all, there’s the guilt that she survived and has landed herself in the middle of a war that she would have denied over and over again had the evidence not been the body of the only person that seemed to matter to her anymore. 

But then, a year and some change later, she’s pointing the Colt to Sam’s temple while Dean tries to get his father to wake up. He shakes John, looking at Sam with shock and what looks like a glimmer of hope, a hope that was most likely misplaced. But maybe not, she hopes not. 

“Sam?” 

They don’t have time to talk, because John is awake and John isn’t himself, according to Sam. John asks, orders, and nearly begs her to shoot Sam. An imposter framing another imposter. Dean hesitates and all it takes is that fraction of a second and a bottle is broken against his head. He hits the ground with a groan and John, or the thing wearing John’s 

Jess stands alone for that moment, at least she thinks she does. But Sam looks at her, startled out of a haze and yells, 

“Now!” 

Jess doesn’t know what makes her comply, makes her believe that this is a Sam she can trust. Maybe a different Sam, but still the man she dropped her life for, the man she hit the road for, the man she wouldn’t have hesitated to kill demons for then and definitely wouldn’t hesitate now. She shoots and the bullet hits John, the demon, right above his left eye. He stutters for a moment, like his body was catching up with it’s death. Then it burns and glows a fiery yellow-gold. Jess looks away and to Dean, Dean who walks up to Sam with the flask in his hand and splashes a good amount of holy water in his face. It doesn’t burn. 

She isn’t the first to hug Sam, no, Dean doesn’t bother to wait after the flask is closed again. It’s a moment of tears and the obvious blessed feeling of “nothing can keep me from my family anymore” and Jess feels light for the first time in ages. When Dean pulls away, looking at Sam like none of it could be real, Sam looks at Jess and reaches for her. They don’t pull apart for what must be an eternity, both of them alive and well, together again. 

Two days later they burn John’s body and watch the remains of one man’s revenge trip turned to ash. They were fine now, alive, safe. Maybe the grief of the time passed was ever present, maybe they still had a job to do, but they were okay, and that was enough for now.


End file.
